Cult Films

B MOVIES AND TRASH

Perhaps the first movies to develop cult followings were B
movies—those quickly made, cheaply produced films that had their
heyday in Hollywood's "Golden Age." B movies began to
proliferate in the mid-1930s, when distributors felt that "double
features" might stand a chance of luring increasingly frugal
Depression audiences back to the theaters. Their strategy
worked—audiences of devoted moviegoers thrilled to cheap B movie
fare like
The Mummy's Hand
(1940),
The Face Behind the Mask
(1941),
Cobra Woman
(1944), and
White Savage
(1943). Often (but not always) horror or science-fiction films, these
movies were inexpensively produced and usually unheralded—except by
their fans, who often found more to enjoy in these bottom-rung
"guilty pleasures" than in the high-profile epics their
profits supported.

B movies were cheaply made, but were not necessarily poor in quality.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, however, a number of rather inept films
were made that have subsequently developed substantial cult followings.
The "trash" movie aesthetic was founded on an appreciation
for these low-budget movies. Struggling with severe budgetary limitations,
directors were regularly forced to come up with makeshift costuming and
set design solutions that produced truly strange and sometimes
unintentionally comic results. The trash aesthetic was later borrowed by
underground filmmakers like Andy Warhol (1928–1987), Jack Smith
(1932–1989), and the Kuchar Brothers (George [b. 1942] and Mike [b.
1942]), who also made their films in the cheapest possible way.

Most of the original trash cinema failed miserably at the box office, and
has developed a cult reputation only in retrospect, after being
reappropriated by a later audience with an eye for nostalgic irony. For
the most part, the films were not products of the big Hollywood studios;
most of them were made independently, often targeted at the drive-in
theater market, and some were made outside the United States. Such films
include the Japanese monster epic
Godzilla
(1954) and its low-budget Danish imitation
Reptilicus
(1962), as well as shabby Boris Karloff vehicles like
Die Monster Die
(1965), and bizarre sexploitation films like
The Wild Women of Wongo
(1958). Today, many movie buffs are drawn to the camp, kitschy qualities
of these movies—their minimal budgets, low production values, and
appalling acting. Many such films were made by Roger Corman (b. 1926), who
originally specialized in quickie productions with low-budget resources
and little commercial marketing, including
Attack of the Crab Monsters
(1957) and
Creature from the Haunted Sea
(1961). Corman's place in cult film history is also assured by his
unrivaled eye for talent; among the many notables who were employed by him
at a very early stage in their careers are Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford
Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, and Peter
Bogdanovich.

The unrivaled king of trash cinema was undoubtedly Edward D. Wood, Jr.
(1924–1978), whose output—films like
Bride of the Monster
(1955) and
Plan 9 from Outer Space
(1959)—are considered the nadir of naive charm. These movies have
been much celebrated in retrospect because of their unique and endearing
ineptitude and for the implausibility of their premises. Like most other
"bad" cult movies, Wood's films lack finesse and wit,
but are loved by their fans for precisely this reason. Significantly,
cults have also recently grown up around more contemporary
"bad" movies. For example, almost immediately after the
theatrical release of
Showgirls
(Paul Verhoeven, 1995), which recouped only half its $40 million cost,
the film opened in Los Angeles and then in New York as a midnight cult
movie. This phenomenon suggests that the cult movie aesthetic is not
necessarily antithetical to the big-budget, mass-market mode of production
nourished by the major Hollywood studios.

This crossover also raises the question of the distinction between
"cult" and "camp." Generally speaking, camp
began in the New York underground theater and film communities, and is a
quality of the way movies are received, rather than a deliberate quality
of the films themselves. Indeed, camp, according to critic Susan Sontag,
is always the product of pure passion—on however grand or pathetic
a scale—somehow gone strangely awry. To be considered camp, it is
not enough for a film to fail, or to seem dated, extreme, or freakish;
there must be a genuine passion and sincerity about its creation. Camp is
based on a faith and emotion in the film that is shared by director and
audience, often across the passage of time, contradicting the popular
assumption that camp is concerned only with surfaces and the superficial.

The two concepts—camp and cult—clearly overlap in a number
of ways, and many films develop cult followings because of their camp
qualities. For example, many studio films have attracted a retrospective
devotion through a process of reappropriation on the part of gay
audiences. This is especially true of films that feature gay icons, like
Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, Liza Minelli, or Barbra Streisand, in
particularly melodramatic or pathetic roles. Such films include
Mildred Pierce
(1945),
The Best of
Everything
(1959),
AStarisBorn
(both the 1954 and 1976 versions),
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
(1962), and similar pictures that are considered by their fans to be
especially mawkish, sentimental, overly serious, or too straight-faced.
For example, the 1981 Joan Crawford biopic
Mommie Dearest
was almost immediately proclaimed a camp masterpiece by Crawford's
gay followers and hit the midnight circuit immediately after its first
run.

Often described as the "worst director in history,"
Wood's following has exploded since his death. For years, a small
group of Ed Wood cultists treasured the two films that were commercially
available—
Glen or Glenda?
(1953) and
Plan 9 From Outer Space
(1959)—without knowing much about the man himself. This all
changed with the publication in 1992 of Rudolph Grey's reverent
biography
Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr.
and the release of Tim Burton's runaway success
Ed Wood
(1994), a dark comedy based on the life, times, and movies of the
infamous director.

Wood's cult status is due in part to his endearingly unorthodox
personality and unusual openness about his sexual fetishes. A
twice-married transvestite, Wood fought in World War II and claimed to
have been wearing a bra and panties under his uniform during a military
landing. His ventures into Hollywood moviemaking were ill-fated until,
in 1953, he landed the chance to direct a film based on the Christine
Jorgensen sex-change story. The result,
Glen or Glenda?
, gave a fascinating insight into Wood's own obsessive
personality, and shed light on his fascination with women's
clothing (an almost unthinkable subject for an early 1950s feature) by
including the director's own plea for tolerance toward
cross-dressers like himself. This surreal, cheap (though well over
budget), and virtually incomprehensible film is notable for Bela
Lugosi's role as a scientist delivering cryptic messages about
gender directly to the audience. Neither
Glen or Glenda?
nor any of Wood's subsequent movies were commercially
successful, but he continued to make films until failing health and
financial need sent him into a physical and emotional decline.
Grey's biography presents Wood in his later years as a moody
alcoholic; sadly, the last period of his career, before his premature
death at age 54, was spent directing undistinguished soft, and later
hardcore, pornography.

Wood's films have been canonized by cultists as high camp, and
continue to be adored for their charming ineptitude, startling
continuity gaps, bad acting, and irrelevant stock footage. His
best-known film is the infamous
Plan 9 from Outer Space
, which features aliens arriving on earth and attempting to conquer the
planet by raising the dead. The film is notorious for its pathetic,
illogical script, cardboard masonry, ridiculous "special
effects," and the use of kitchen utensils as space helmets. It
stars the heavily accented Swedish wrestler Tor Jonson and a
drug-addled, terminally ill Bela Lugosi, who died during production and
is sporadically replaced by a stand-in who, even with his cape drawn
over his face, looks nothing at all like the decrepit Lugosi. The film
also features the glamorous Finnish actress Maila Nurmi, better known as
Vampira, generally believed to be the first late-night television horror
hostess (and followed by many imitators, including the more successful
Elvira, Mistress of the Dark).
Plan 9 from Outer Space
contains the only surviving footage of Vampira, although she has no
dialogue in the film.

FURTHER READING

Other films have developed cult followings because of their unique
presentation of new gimmicks or special effects. For example, Herschell
Gordon Lewis's drive-in blockbuster
Blood Feast
(1963) has attained cult status partly because it was the first film to
feature human entrails and dismembered bodies "in blood
color." The films of William Castle (1914–1977) have
attracted a cult following mainly because of their pioneering use of

low-budget publicity schemes and special effects, including
"Percepto" (specially wired-up seats) for
The Tingler
(1959); "Emergo" (a cardboard skeleton on a wire hanging
over the audience) for
The House on Haunted Hill
(1958); and "Illusion-O" (a 3–D viewer) for
13 Ghosts
(1960)—although there are those who claim that Castle's
most successful gimmick was his use of the hammy, smooth-voiced actor
Vincent Price (1911–1993). In a similar way, John Waters's
Polyester
(1981) is a cult film partly because of its use of
"Odorama" (audience scratch-and-sniff cards), and Roger
Vadim's
Barbarella
(1968) has achieved cult status mainly due to the extravagance of its
costumes and sets, including Jane Fonda's thigh-high boots and
fur-lined spaceship.

There are also a number of iconic directors whose every movie has attained
cult status, mainly because their films tend to replicate the same
individual fascinations or pathologies. A good example is Russ Meyer
(1922–2004), whose films are especially popular among those fans,
both male and female, who share his obsession with buxom actresses engaged
in theatrical violence. Most typical of the Meyer oeuvre is perhaps
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
(1966), which features three leather-clad, voluptuous, thrill-seeking
women in go-go boots.

A different kind of cult movie is the film that has attracted curiosity
because of the particular circumstances surrounding its release. Such
films may have been banned in certain states, for example; they may have
had controversial lawsuits brought against them, or they may have been
associated with particularly violent crimes, like
A Clockwork Orange
(1971) or
Taxi Driver
(1976). Or they may be notoriously difficult to find, like Todd
Haynes's
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
(1987), a study in celebrity and anorexia in the guise of a biopic
performed by Barbie dolls. The movie was quickly taken off the market for
copyright reasons, but has still managed to attract a substantial cult
following.

In other cases, films attain retrospective cult status because of the
circumstances surrounding their production. For example,
The Terror
(1963) is a cult film partly because of Jack Nicholson's early
appearance in a starring role, and
Donovan's Brain
(1953) gains cult status because of the presence of the actress Nancy
Davis, later to become better known as First Lady Nancy Reagan. Moreover,
scandalous public disclosures that accumulate around actors or actresses
inevitably give their films a certain amount of morbid cult interest. For
example, in his
Hollywood Babylon
books (1975 and 1984), underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger (b. 1927)
keeps a toll of films involving one or more celebrities who eventually
took their own lives, all of which have since come to attain an odd kind
of cult status of their own. Anger also discusses "cursed"
films that feature stars who died soon after production was
completed—films like
Rebel without a Cause
(1955), starring James Dean, and
The Misfits
(1961), starring Marilyn Monroe. In cases like these, fans often enjoy
subjecting the film to microscopic scrutiny in a search for telltale
betrayals of bad health, signals of some emotional meltdown, portents of
future tragedy, or innocently spoken words of irony, regardless of what
else might be happening on screen. For example, parallels are often drawn
between the death of James Dean in an automobile accident and the
"chicken run" scene in
Rebel without a Cause
, in which Jim Stark (Dean) and his friend are driving two stolen cars
toward the edge of a cliff; the first one to jump out is a
"chicken." Jim rolls out at the last second, but his
friend's coat sleeve is caught in the door handle, and he hurtles
over the cliff to his death. In the aftermath, we hear Dean's
anguished cry: "A boy was killed!"

User Contributions:

Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: